“Now come to think of it, a drummer from Altoona
left a paper copy of one of his books the last trip.”

CHAPTER XIII

A Post-Knickerbocker Petronius

A Post-Knickerbocker Petronius—­The Early
Life of Mr. Ward McAllister—­A
Discovery of Europe—­A Glimpse of British
High Life—­The Judgment of a
Diplomat—­The South and Newport—­Organizing
New York Society—­The
“Four Hundred”—­Maxims of a
Master and Maitre d’Hotel.

He does not reign in Russia
cold,
Nor
yet in far Cathay,
But o’er this town he’s
come to hold
An
undisputed sway.

When in their might the ladies
rose,
“To
put the Despot down,”
As blandly as Ah Sin, he goes
His
way without a frown.

Alas! though he’s but
one alone,
He’s
one too many still—­
He’s fought the fight,
he’s held his own,
And
to the end he will.

—­From a Lady after the Ball of February
25, 1884.

Mrs. Burton Harrison, in “Recollections, Grave
and Gay,” told of a visit made in 1892 as one
of a party of invited guests travelling by special
train to the newly built Four Seasons Hotel at Cumberland
Gap, in Tennessee, where the directors of a new land
company and health-resort scheme had arranged a week
of sports and entertainments. About forty congenial
persons from New York and Washington made the trip,
the mountaineers and their families along the route
assembling at stations to see the notabilities among
them. The chief attraction, Mrs. Harrison recorded,
seemed to be Ward McAllister, who had been expected,
but did not go. At one station, James Brown Potter,
engaged in taking a constitutional to remove train
stiffness, was pointed out by another of the party
to a group of staring natives as the famous arbiter
of New York fashion.

“I want to know!” said a gaunt mountain
horseman. “Wal, I’ve rid fifteen
miles a-purpus to see that dude McAllister, and I don’t
begrutch it, not a mite.”

All over the land there were yokels and the spouses
of yokels and even the children of yokels, moved by
a like interest and curiosity; while rural visitors
to New York, and also New Yorkers born for that matter—­if
such a person as a born New Yorker actually existed—­craned
their necks from the tops of the Fifth Avenue buses
in the hope of catching a glimpse of the great man,
who, for a brief, flitting moment was an institution
of as much importance as the Obelisk or the Metropolitan
Museum of Art.